Sarah Palin has described the hack of her webmail account as the "most disruptive" event in her campaign to become US vice president last year.
Palin singles out the hack into her Yahoo! web account as "the most disruptive and discouraging" incident in the presidential campaign in her new book Going Rogue: An American Life, …

Godidit!

Disruption

She was clearly talking about the effect on the campaign staff and strategy, internally, not the effect on the electorate. So I think her point may well be valid. McCain's people didn't know how to handle her in the first place, and mis-used an asset. Would they have done better with yet another career male politician? I doubt it, but the "campaign" would have run more to script.

The big difference between Palin and Bush, apart from Bush senior, is that Palin is more articulate. As with Bush, many of the solecisms attributed to her are spurious, including some TV footage of her being satirized by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live that people attribute to Palin herself, either ignorantly or deliberately. Take her seriously. The Democrats do, hence the rage.

Track?

Lemme get this straight:

We have a bimbo presenting more style than substance - (DO those glasses have corrective lenses? There doesn't seem to be any change in the background when you catch a view of it through them. ) She seems incapable of basic security and uses public webmail for governmental business

She is a tool

The Worlds only real superpower, possible VP of that super power and she is using a webmail account for personal and state communications. with no control over any low grade techie that could access those emails, never mind a world of MALWARE used to hack it, and then adds the worlds almost easiest passwords.

Anyone else think that if she did become a VP that she would stop using Yahoo??????

I am with Matt Damon in his interview on this. I really want to know if she honestly believes the earth is only 4000 years old.

She can't be too dumb

She realized that the speaking circuit paid better than being governor. She (reportedly) got a six figure fee for a Hong Kong engagement alone. She was speaking on global economics I believe (I know I know "wtf?").

I guess once you get bit by the Sax Fifth Avenue you have to have some way to support the habit.

Are you forgetting a couple details?

McCain was going to be the presidential candidate for the GOP. He wasn't the wrong selection as much as she was the wrong selection for him. She's still very inconsistent and one to blame anything but herself. She blames a campaign staffer for the Couric interview...

Sarah Palin was the bright spot in the American elections

Governor Palin was the bright spot in the American elections - she was more qualified for the executive branch, through her previous business and political experience than the now elected American President.

It was good to see a governor, who understood & had practical experience with Energy Policy, for a position in the Executive Branch of the United States government.

@ sleepy 3 - re 'Track?'...

The worry is...

...that she claims the hack stopped he communicating with her staff in Alaska. It was only a webmail account. How hard would it be for her to set up a new webmail account and communicate with her staff using that address? And if that's too difficult for her she would probably need to win an election to consider her a member of a sentient species.

ITT: Butthurt liberals

In many ways I have come to expect our elected officials to be none too technically or technologically savvy. If they were, we would not continue to have lacking process and procedure to deal with technology, nor the face-palm moments when yet another politician says something really out there regarding technology and especially the "series of tubes" that is the Internet. It is getting better, and many things only get better with experience.

Do I fault her, or anyone, for having bad passwords or easy-to-find information in reminders? No, because that is how we are guided, and that is how "the system" is set up. Passwords are hazardous, especially user-chosen passwords, and reminders are even worse. The more services are dumbed-down, the dumber users will become.

Do I fault her, or anyone, for using a web mail account? No, again because that it what we are shown to do. And for any dipstick who would give guff for using web mail for state business, did we forget that our administration wanted to move everything over to Google and GMail? But I suppose that would have been okay, and probably an historic move. And for that matter, I would bet that a large number of ElReg audience who do not run their own services use a web mail service.

And lastly, to throw my hat down in the political arena, I have to say that I have listened very carefully to both sides of this particular campaign from the beginning, and have drawn these conclusions: McCain is an honorable man lacking in some conservative common sense; Clinton is conniving yet somehow genuine in her goals; Obama is a serial liar, thuggish, and has nothing but power on his mind; Palin is a true conservative, down-to-earth and strong.

And for the twat who emailed me about why I would not answer his frothing post from another article, I do not answer (or most of the time even read) AC posts. Want to say something? Have the balls to put your name or pseudonym on it. Have an opinion? Claim it, punk.

Stupid voters

It is an almost exclusively liberal mistake to criticize candidates for being less than intellectual. The vast majority of voters don't identify themselves as being particularly smart either, having been told so in school. I know people in this country who quite happily say they are not smart. Some of them make more money than me.

Call her a dumb redneck and half the rural states will just say "She's our girl!" They like what she has to say, and the fact that the stuck up city people say she's dumb just makes it better.

She had no useful experience

Her biggest drawback was that she was everything that McCain had previously said was bad about Obama - lack of experience, hers being "executive" didn't actually give her anything more useful, especially of a state with such a small population. She had no proper media training (or at least didn't appear to have any) and was torn apart by her own comments. While it is true she never said "I can see Russia from my house", she actually responded to a question about in what way was she best placed to handle a situation like Russia/Ossetia with "You can see Russia from some Alaskan islands" (which was the origin of the spoof) as if looking at a distant coastline gives you international relations experience. If you can't even handle the soft questions of Katie Couric (whose questions didn't even get close to the one above, they were more like "What are your hobbies?", she's like a smarter version of Judy Finnegan) then how the hell can you run the country?

McCain on the other hand was the maverick in 2000, but realised that he wouldn't even get the nomination if he didn't go ultra conservative in the following 8 years, which made him the obvious loser overall since he turned from a decent alternative to Bush into an apparent straight swap.

Palin still shows how politically naive she is, like when she helped remove the republican candidate from a county election because she wasn't conservative enough, leaving only an inept independent conservative to oppose the democrat. The democrat won that area for the first time in over a century. It was a relatively insignificant thing to get involved in, but the republican party lost a lot of face (and a sure thing) for no good reason.

Having her email hacked (if you can even call it that) was nothing and barely got news coverage at all. I read about it more on here than saw on any of the US news networks. It may have been annoying to her, but don't lecture us on national security if you got burned due to having poor email security.

You don't have anything to worry about..

Palin wasn't supposed to be using a private webmail account to conduct official State business. So what I read from this is getting caught breaking the law, again, was a disruption. I know this because I work for the State of Alaska, just as I know that our state webmail system can be accessed easily anywhere, with no more difficulty than any free service like Hotmail or Gmail. She got caught and like all good right wingers thinks she can deflect attention away from her transgressions by whining about political bias in the media.

As for Palin winning, you needn't fear. Just one TV commercial showing how the mighty Katie Couric managed to confuse Palin to the point that she couldn't remember the name of a newspaper. Not a single one.

If she can be so flustered under question from someone whose investigative reporting experience mostly comes from being the pretty face on morning TV, then what happens when she has to face a hostile foreign leader?

We'll gloss over her attempts to burn library books about devil worshipping.. err I mean science.. as well as her attempt to use her political position to get her sister's ex-husband fired and move straight to her quitting her job as a right wing Governor in charge of the most right wing State in the union. If she felt so overwhelmed by the pressure from local press and her own party's lawmakers, what are we to expect when she has to deal with running the country? Quitting as President after 2 months?

She claimed that the mighty Katie Couric and the media unfairly went after her.. presumably by asking questions. No in a fair, politically unbiased world, the media would never question a right wing politician for cronyism, corruption and bullshit.

She honestly believes the reason she was attacked was political bias rather than the unprecedented stupidity of a candidate for the second highest office in the land. She makes Dan Quale look like a candidate for Mensa.

I'll leave you with the knowledge that she publicly allowed one of those nutter, bible thumping preachers perform an exorcism on her to cast out witches and demons. Even Bush Jnr wasn't that insane.

When Palin runs for office she will be an irrelevant independent candidate, because any rival GOP candidate will trounce her in the primaries. She will then claim the GOP is too liberal and garner perhaps 3% of the nutter vote traditionally reserved for bigoted xenophobes like Pat Buchanan.